Weird 90s - LFO’s LFO or Bleep goes mainstream

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The sun rises over the Catalan hills, August 2024

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After completing my book on Daft Punk’s Discovery - still available from all good book shops etc and so on - I was searching for something else to write about and I hit on the idea of looking back at the rave hits of my childhood, what happened to the people who made them and how listening to these weird electronic smashes had influenced a generation of British kids.

There was some interest from a publisher and I ended up writing a few chapters. But, in the end, the publisher wanted to go in a direction that I wasn’t into and the book idea got shelved. I am currently working on another book, which I shall reveal more about in due course. (It’s scheduled for release in 2026, so we have time.) But I thought I would publish some of the rave book - provisionally titled Weird 90s - here.

Today, I give you the chapter I wrote on LFO’s LFO, a number 12 hit in the UK in summer 1990 that allowed me to go into the idea of credibility, as relates to pre-teen music fans, as well as LFO’s own fascinating history. I spoke to LFO’s Gez Varley about it, some of which ended up as a Line Noise, and some of which didn’t. This chapter has, I believe, some exclusive news about how LFO talked about getting back together before Mark Bell’s death in 2014.

This is a lot longer than your typical Substack entry. But it also took a lot more effort and is, I hope, worth your while. Should any publishers be blinded by the dodgy brilliance of my book idea, feel free to get in touch.

LFO - LFO

Released: July 1990

UK chart peak: 12

Top of the Pops performance: None (although they played the video twice)

As a child you know nothing and care even less about whether songs are credible or not. Songs are either good or not, successful or not. And if songs are both good and successful then the artist must - by juvenile definition - be an excellent pop star, be they The Firm, with their Star Trek-themed novelty hit Star Trekkin’, or Madonna (both of whom appeared on Now! knock off compilation The Hits volume 6 and will, therefore, be forever linked in my mind). In fact, I was borderline shocked, later on in life, when I discovered that Pet Shop Boys were considered a canonical pop group, while Furniture, whose Brilliant Mind appeared alongside Opportunities (Let's Make Lots Of Money) on Now…7, were basically forgotten.

This brings us to LFO and the third chapter of my excursion into the electronic music of my childhood. LFO, aka Mark Bell and Gez Varley, two breakdancers from Leeds, are rightly considered one of the most important groups in British electronic music. They pioneered the Northern English Bleep techno sound, of steel-washed synths and vast sub bass, which was, arguably, the first subgenre of techno to originate from outside the US. Bleep was a sound that was genuinely British - in its appropriation, via Jamaica, of reggae sub bass - and hugely influential, bleeding into the jungle and hardcore scenes, while making waves in the techno world. 

LFO weren’t the only artist operating in this space or necessarily the first: Unique 3’s classic debut single The Theme beat them to the punch by two years. But LFO embodied the Bleep sound and brought it to mainstream attention when their debut single LFO hit the British top 20 in summer 1990. What’s more, their debut album Frequencies is, to my mind, the best record to come out of the Bleep scene, its home-listenability sowing the seed of the album-based delights of Warp’s Artificial Intelligence album series, which debuted one year after Frequencies, in 1992. (In fact, with due reverence to Sweet Exorcist, Forgemasters and Nightmares on Wax, LFO were probably the act who put Warp on the map, giving the label its first genuine, chart-bothering hit.) Suffice to say that when a music lover introduces a friend to Bleep music, nine times out of ten the first record they reach for will be LFO, which is a beautiful legacy for a band to have.

I loved LFO when I first heard the song in summer 1990. It had glacial melodies that produced a beautifully troubling feeling, somewhere between fear and sadness, a galloping beat and a chilling vocal hook, in which a Speak & Spell toy spelled out the band’s name. It also had a bass line bowel-wobblingly intense enough to put the put the wind up your skirts, although I didn’t realise this until many years later when I got a better stereo.

And yet what I didn’t know was that LFO was a credible song: the kind of song that older brothers, the NME and rave DJs played; a song that you could have played on the school’s sixth form stereo without fear of getting laughed at. And yet at 12 years old I had no idea that LFO was, in any way, more credible or downright cool than Candy Flip’s cover of Strawberry Fields Forever, released earlier the same year. I loved them both, equally.

LFO’s LFO was not, by any popular definition, a cartoon rave song. It contained no samples of children’s cartoons or silly hooks; LFO did not appear on Top of the Pops miming to their hit in silly rave outfits or get accused by Mixmag of killing rave. And yet it did have elements that children could - and did - get into. The melodies were simple and beautifully stated, you could play them on the family piano and just about come up with something similar; and the vocal hook could certainly be reproduced in the playground by a gifted mimic with a gruff voice, to the amusement of your friends. It sounded a little like a robot having a moral crisis - and children love robots. Not to mention the fact that LFO was made on a Speak & Spell, a familiar educational toy that was found in hundreds of thousands of British households in the 1980s. 

LFO - the song - wasn’t cartoon rave, then. But it did have something slightly, brilliantly, cartoon-y about it, in its pushed-to-the-max production and mimic-able vocal hook, that Unique 3’s The Theme or Nightmare On Wax’s Dextrous didn’t possess. So the song belongs here, for all its credibility, and I am glad it can fit. Because LFO’s story is one of lightning success, broken friendships and a heart-warming entente that was cut tragically short by Mark Bell’s death in 2014 at the age of just 43, following complications after surgery.

I must have first heard LFO on Radio One, which is ironic, as Varley claims that Simon Mayo, a classic Radio DJ of the old guard, was particularly annoyed by LFO, calling it the worst record he had ever heard. (Varley also claims that this was because LFO refused to play radio pluggers who would get the song into the charts.)

Whatever Mayo’s personal whims and musical tastes, though, he couldn’t keep LFO off Radio One. John Peel, the station’s arbiter of outsider cool, played the track on his late-night shows, where it sat alongside death metal, skronky indie and African highlife. But I wasn’t listening to that - or not yet anyway. And LFO still filtered through. 

Radio One was obliged to play any music that was in the charts in its Sunday Top 40 rundown, annoying or not, which meant that even the most extreme electronic music could be heard by an audience of millions should it appear in the Top 40. Such was the way with a national broadcaster that, like an FM Spiderman, wielded extreme power with extreme responsibility; and I also recall hearing Tricky Disco’s eponymous song, another Bleep classic from the Warp staple, released the same month as LFO, on the Top 40. 

Top of the Pops, the BBC’s flagship music show, was also obliged to play what was on the charts even if, as was the case with LFO, the group didn’t want to appear. In fact, Top of the Pops aired the LFO video twice, in July and August of 1990, as the song climbed the charts, bringing it to millions of eyeballs.

I was, of course, no raver at the age of 12, when I first heard LFO. But I had some experience of electronic music by this age, handed down from Radio One and Top of the Pops in their eclectic obligations. So it didn’t sound too alien to me.

Varley explains that he was always into music. “I was about seven years old, and my dad was a bit of a Hi Fi enthusiast, back in 70s,” he says. He’s speaking to me from his mum’s house in Bridlington, a seaside town in Yorkshire about 65 miles from Leeds. Varley moved to Germany in 1999, in the name of love and techno, but, at the time of our interview, had been back in the UK for three years, after experiencing some health problems. “My dad played gave me Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon and they just blew me away, the On The Run track, where he’s using  keyboards. That was my first introduction into, you know, proper music.”

Varley’s dad was also into reggae - a musical genre that would prove very influential on LFO - while his elder brothers listened to heavy metal and punk. But it was breakdancing that proved the electronic breakthrough: in 1983 Varley formed a crew with his friends in Leeds, many of whom would go on to be part of the Bleep scene, including Nightmares on Wax, Ital rockers and Unique 3. Breakdancing meant electro music and especially the Street Sounds compilation series, which in turn led Varley to house and techno music - “early Detroit and Phuture’s Acid Tracks”. In 1987 he bought his first drum machine, graduating to a Casio FZ-10 sampler, then Roland’s classic 808 drum machine.

Varley and Bell, who grew up in different parts of Leeds, first met in 1984, as members of rival breakdance crews. They met again four years later on a photography course and decided to make music together, alongside Martin Williams, who was both a tutor on their  course and resident DJ at the Leeds Warehouse club. (In an 2002 interview with the Milk Factory, Mark Bell explained that, at the age of 14, he bought an 808 drum machine from his then girlfriend’s dad for £25, adding, in a truly gorgeous detail, that the dad “used to do Lady In Red-style demos with it”.)

I tell Varley it seems amazing that so much incredible music  - essentially the basis of the UK Bleep sound - would come from a small group of friends from Leeds and neighbouring Bradford. 

“It was just the right place at the right time,” he says, particularly nonplussed. “We used to hang around the same record shops in Leeds, Jumbo Records was one and Crash Records was the other. We’re in Crash Records and our mates come in with a box full of white labels and it was [Unique 3’s] The Theme. We were just blown away. And I remember saying, ‘Mark, Martin, come on, we’ve got to do something now. All the other homeboys are doing it, we can do it.’  We had an early set up and we were jamming at Martin’s house at Chapeltown in Leeds. So we just started banging on doing tracks. We thought, ‘It's possible.’”

The initial idea for LFO was “to do something different”. “We just wanted to do what we wanted to do,” Varley says. “We started off with a real sort of dance attitude at the beginning and slowly drifted away because Warp started getting more input and they wanted album tracks, which wasn’t a bad direction to go.”

This “dance attitude” was, in many ways, a practical approach for the fledgling LFO. Their initial goal was to make music for the Warehouse, where Williams was resident; he would play their demos, including an early version of LFO that Varley says “was rocking the crowd”. LFO met Rob Gordon, who founded Warp with Rob Mitchell and Steve Beckett, at The Warehouse one night and played him their tape of 30 demos, which led to a deal and the release of LFO in July 1990.

Varley says he knew that LFO were onto something with their debut single: Martin would play it in clubs. where it would get a huge reaction and Varley thought it might sell 5,000 copies. Of course, it did far, far more than that. “It was out on promo for a couple of months and people like John Peel were playing it,” Varley explains. “John Peel was one of my heroes growing up. And when my dad first heard it, he said, ‘Wow, it's really good track.’ He wasn’t into techno but he knew it was good. So I kind of had the feeling it will go top forty, maybe to thirty, but we didn’t think it would reach number 12. It just snowballed.”

Bell and Varley were very young themselves at the time: they wrote LFO at 18 and had reached 19 when it hits the charts. They weren’t that much older than me, then, in my Norfolk bedroom. But back then, in the adolescent years, seven years is an eternity and at the age of 12 I could no more imagine myself speaking to a member of LFO than, say, operating heavy machinery. 

I ask Varley how he felt about pre teens, such as myself, listening to their music in 1990. He seems vaguely bemused. “Yeah, it’s kind of funny because over the years, I've met a lot of people and they’ve said, ‘Wow, it’s like the first record I've ever bought.’ And, you know, you just didn't think it would influence everybody like that,” he says. (For the record, the first record I bought was Europe’s The Final Countdown. But I did buy We Are Back, the follow up to LFO, on splendid 12-inch vinyl in the early 90s.) 

“We never dreamed of how many people it would influence,” he adds. “I've just started dating this girl last year from Sweden and she she used to be a DJ. The first record she ever bought was We Are Back by LFO. So I thought, ‘I’m in with a chance there!’”

LFO wasn’t the first electronic song I enjoyed. But I might have been one of the most extreme. Of course the song had riffs to get your teeth into. But I wonder if there was something in LFO’s youthfulness that seeped into the record, a kind of freedom and unkempt energy that reached out to my pre-teen brain. Or maybe it was Varley’s punk and heavy metal roots. At 12, I was just coming out of my own heavy metal phase, where Iron Maiden ruled supreme, and  was getting into the kind of punk that skateboard magazines would give the occasional page to. 

I ask Varley about this metal connection, half expecting to be laughed off the Facebook Messenger call. He sounds amused, one pre-teen heavy metal fan perhaps not wanting to disappoint another. “Metal? The attitude maybe and also maybe Tied Up [from LFO’s second album Advance], we banged in quite a few guitar loops and samples and distorted and twanged around with them and needed t a bit more industrial beef,” he says. 

“So there were a bit of influence there later on. But it's sort of there, you know, in your head. Even though musically it might not sound like it. It's the attitude. A lot of them early heavy metal records they had energy, you know? Same with the punk stuff. A lot of good energy. So, I think that comes comes across but maybe not so obvious.” 

The success of LFO meant that the band became a huge deal on the UK’s club scene: remix offers came flooding in and the duo started to play live gigs. But for me what counted was that LFO had had a chart hit - number 12 was nothing to be sniffed at - and that meant they were, by definition, pop stars. 

Did they ever feel that way? “Not really,” Varley replies, clearly amused. “But the area where I grew up in, Bramley, Leeds, there was a gang of school girls that just kept following me around.” He laughs at the memory. And, yes, in a way it sounds ridiculous, a bunch of school girls following around an underground dance producer / Bleep techno pioneer in a Western part of Leeds. On the other hand, he was a pop star, damn it! Anointed by the charts in a way that could never be undone. 

“You went out at nights to meets your mates and go the pub and I’m getting followed by this group of 14-year-old girls. It was a bit embarrassing, actually…” he continues. “I remember John Peel rang us up to do this John Peel session and that was like such an honour, to meet people that you totally liked and then there were a lot of interviews with NME and Melody Maker and all this kind of stuff. So you didn't really feel like a pop star but you felt, ‘Oh yeah, we’re getting recognised.’”

They also turned down Top of the Pops, an act that, for the 12-year-old me - and even for the forty something version of today, nearly two decades after the show was cancelled - seems reckless beyond belief, almost a dereliction of LFO’s pop star duties, which, perhaps, was the point.

Varley puts the decision down to shyness. “We turned it down,” he says. “I don’t know…. our mates Unique 3 did it. Quite a few people we knew did it. I am mates with Altern-8 and they did it. But we never did it. I don’t know… we were a bit shy in some ways. It didn’t seem natural to go on there and do it.”

Did they ever regret that?

“A little bit says, ‘Yeah’ and the other bit says, ‘No, we kept it cool,’” 

Varley laughs heartily. LFO certainly did keep it cool. But these things don’t seem so important 30+ years on. “I mean, we just wanted to make music and we were put in this position: ‘You have to do this; you have to do that.’ And we just said we don't want to do it.”

What was the most ridiculous thing they were offered? I have a beautiful vision of LFO clowning around on the Radio One Roadshow at some corny British seaside town, as bemused children hide from the rain. The Shamen did it, after all, live from Blackpool beach. So why not LFO?

Varley laughs again. I take that as a no.

“We got offered quite a lot of stuff,” he says. “We turned a lot of stuff down. Bananarama wanting to do a remix for 4,000 quid. We said no, we're too busy. The funny thing though, we’re in the Warp office and Sweet Exorcist were in, which is Richard Kirk and DJ Parrot. We're talking about this and they said, ‘No way should you do that Gez, you're gonna sell out man. You’ll look really, really bad.’ We said okay, we won’t do it. And guess who did the remix? They did! Fucking two-faced motherfuckers! [This, incidentally, I said with a laugh.] Welcome to the music business!” (And, yes, Bananarama’s 1990 single Tripping On Your Love has not one, but two, Sweet Exorcist remixes, and they are pretty great.) *

Then there was the NME cover that got Varley in trouble with his metal-loving mates. Bell and Varley appeared on the cover of the music magazine in January 1992 in front of a couple of Marshall stacks, with a trio of smashed guitars, as NME promised readers “All you need to know about Techno”. LFO didn’t promise to kill rock, did they?

“We were always attention seekers, weren’t we?” Varley says. “We were in the NME in early January 1992 for the What Is House EP. Basically, NME sort of came up with the concept and it actually shocked a lot of people. Because I've got a lot of mates who were into heavy metal, I used to get some right stick off them in the pub. ‘What the fuck do you think you are? Smashing up guitars?’ I said, ‘Well, it's just an angle!’”

Before then, though, there was the follow up to LFO. After initially making music with little more ambition that to reach DJ Martin and The Warehouse, did the band feel pressure to produce another hit, especially as Martin Williams had left the band to pursue a career in IT, soon after LFO hit?

“Totally, totally,” Varley says. “Warp were pressuring us because whoever was supporting them at the time was putting pressure on them. And we took a year - we did we just did again what we want to do, which was We Are Back, which is the complete opposite to LFO, isn’t it?”

I agree with him, although I am not totally convinced. We Are Back - another brilliant track - shares LFO’s vocal hooks, spooky synth melodies and punishing bass, although it is about three times as menacing, like a robot booting you in the gut as it spits in your face. Although, you know, fun.

“It’s harder, an electro-ish track with robot voices,” Varley continues, putting his case for We Are Back. “We just thought, ‘Do what we do. Because there’s no point re-doing LFO again, is there?’ As an artist, it’s like, ‘Why?’ But that's what the people in the business wanted: another hit. It's not that easy to do, is it?”

We’d all do it if we could.

“Exactly! Good answer.”

We Are Back didn’t give the band another hit, exactly. In July 1991 it debuted at 47, just outside of the golden Top 40 that would have obliged Radio One to give it a spin, then fell to 56 and 74 before dropping out of the charts. It would, in fact, be LFO’s last visit to the Top 50 of the UK’s singles chart, with later releases bouncing around the lower regions of the Top 100.

Varley is justifiably proud of We Are Back, though. “Even going to 47 with a track like We Are Back, it's hard, you know? There's no prisoners on that one. And it did alright.”

In the same month, LFO released their debut album Frequencies. It is an astounding work. At the time, the idea of an electronic music album was still a relative rarity - Warp had released its first LP, Sweet Exorcist’s Clonk’s Coming earlier that year - and LFO were in no mood to compromise their musical vision to make things easier on the home listener. 

But Bell and Varley produced a record that made the album format sound entirely natural for electronic music, their glacial melodies pulsing with titanic strength, even at low volumes. Tan Ta Ra, for example, has the kind of melody you could imagine a milkman whistling, while Simon from Sydney is like Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 2 avant la lettre. From there, the leap towards Warp’s crusade for electronic listening music - as played out on the Artificial Intelligence albums of the early 90s - and therefore IDM was a obvious one. In fact, you could make a case for Frequencies being the first ever IDM album, although Varley - a dedicated fan of techno at its most visceral and body-moving, would probably baulk at the name.

“Well, it took about a year to do from when we did LFO onwards,” Varley says of the album’s recording process. “ An basically we just did what we wanted to do. A lot of those ideas where in our heads for a long time. So we managed to get them out pretty quick… Frequencies came quick and came very natural to us. We just did what we wanted to do. It’s surprising: I meet a lot of electronic musicians when I'm travelling around them and they all say the same thing: that Frequencies is totally amazing.”

Ironically, perhaps, the same home listenability and melodic impulse that I adore in Frequencies may have contributed towards Vardy’s eventual decision to leave LFO. Warp, he said, wanted more album-oriented music. “But I personally wanted to do more dance stuff for the 12 inches you know, even if it was going to be  B sides,” he says. “After a while, I'm talking like four or five years, Warp went very anti-techno. So I got a bit disillusioned with it all. The usual thing with record labels, they want you to go in one direction, you don’t, you know….”

It didn’t help that the second LFO album, Advance, took five years to make, eventually coming out in 1996 when Bleep was just a memory. “The second album, Advance, took five years and there was a lot of fannying around with Warp Records and stuff,” Varley explains. “We were touring a lot and doing remixes and basically, I think we used most of the best ideas on the first album, so then you start from scratch again. In my head anyway.”

There was also a lot of what Varley calls “a lot of bad stuff going on behind the scenes”. “I don't want to go too much into it. But I was getting abused on many different levels. And for example, I'm not credited correctly on a lot of tracks on the Advance album. so after that came out in 1997 I just quit. I said, ‘I’ve had enough.’” (Varley only receives writing credits on two of Advance’s 12 tracks, Shut Down and Kombat Drinking.)

Whatever actually happened - the “bad stuff” that Varley refers to - it is a crying shame that LFO, who once had the youthful temerity to play a 30-track demo to Warp’s Rob Gordon in a car outside The Warehouse, got bogged down in music industry politics, their output slowing to a crawl before Varley departed. One more LFO album would follow, 2003’s Sheath, a Mark Bell solo production, before Bell concentrated his attention on producing other artists, notably Björk, with whom he had an inspired creative relationship, and Depeche Mode.

Varley, meanwhile, put his efforts into the dance-floor focused G-Man project, whose first record was released in 1995. True to his word, G-Man records are steely, dance-floor techno that care little for your armchair listening, although I like to think you can hear something of LFO’s immaculate sound design in their precision-tooled grooves.

Listening to G-Man, it feels inevitable that Varley would eventually move to Germany, the land of cool, metallic techno. And so it came to pass in 1999 when he relocated to Wiesbaden, on the banks of the Rhine. “The G-Man stuff wasn’t so popular in England but when I moved to Germany, everybody knew the G-Man stuff and not many people knew LFO,” Varley says. “So I just concentrated on doing G-Man and to be honest I made more money doing G-Man than I did with LFO.”

This gave him a considerable liberty to follow his creative instincts. “I knew then I could just do what I wanted to do,” he says. “I didn’t have to rely on Mark to do his part of the stuff in the group. I didn’t have to rely on Warp. Because Warp went really anti-techno. I had an argument with them. I said, ‘Are you mental? Your three biggest hits were all techno-based. Are you mad?”

Far from licking his wounds, post-LFO, Varley flourished in Germany. “I went to Germany a lot,” he says. “We used to tour there a lot with LFO so I had a lot of connection. And then a G Man record came out, Quo Vadis, and it was sort of like a massive hit in Germany. So I got 20 bookings in a month and it just went mental. 

“So going over then, I met this girl, she was involved in the Hesse music scene [Hesse is the German state of which Wiesbaden is the capital], she had good connections. So we got together, I moved over there and we had some good years touring Germany, you know? Unfortunately, she died about 10 years ago.” he sighs deeply. “So, yeah, it’s one of those… you know, we're all getting older.”

Varley left the LFO name to Mark Bell and the pair didn’t see each other in six years, until Bell and Varley were booked - separately - to perform at an All Tomorrow’s Parties festival curated by Autechre.

“I saw him [Mark Bell] at All Tomorrow’s Parties in Hastings in 2003,” Varley explains. “He did an LFO DJ set and I did a G-Man set, so we were, like, almost back to back. We hadn’t been in touch for six years, something like that. We had a beer and there were a lot of ill feelings. But we were alright.”

The pair didn’t get back in touch again until just before Bell’s death in 2014. “We had just made friends again,” Varley says. “We started talking about doing LFO again, doing some touring and shit like that, and then a couple months later the poor lad is dead. A bit of a shock.”  

“Mark got on contact on Facebook,” Varley explains. “He got in touch just before he died; we had a long conversation on Facebook about three in the morning. I was saying, ‘I’m playing in Leeds with Slam.’ He was going to come down to the gig but he had to go back to Iceland. He had children there, one of them was going into hospital or something, so he couldn't make it, fair enough. 

“Then we were just loosely talking, we were on about, you know, I said, ‘If you need any help with gigs then we can do some gigs. And he says, ‘Yeah, yeah.’ That was the last time I talked to him, so it was all loose, loosely talking about possibilities. Next thing I heard he’s sadly died. I was really shocked. Because he was only about 43 at the time.”

Varley sounds sad, in that typically British, that’s-how-it-goes-type way. 43 must sound young - incredibly young - now Varley is in his 50s and with his own health problems in the rear view mirror. Add to this the death of Varley’s German girlfriend and you have a story that is increasingly relatable, as the clock ticks on, and yet still incredible sad.

If there is an upside to this, it may be that Varley can look back on his time in LFO with maximum pride and minimum regrets, his relationship with Bell healed - or certainly on its way to healing - just in time. 

So what does he think of his time with LFO, a seminal British band, whose reputation only grows year by year but also, clearly, the source of considerable angst and heartbreak, after things fell apart on creative, business and personal levels?

“Most of it was good, towards the end it got a bit nasty,” he says. “But overall, we had some great experiences: toured most of Europe, we went to America, signed with Tommy Boy, we went to Japan. There were couple of good albums out, three or four good singles, we did some cool remixes. 

“So when I look back, it's alright, you know? I still get royalty money coming in, not a huge amount, but I still get bits and bobs come in, which ticks me over. With hindsight, I might have done some things differently. I think Mark would have done as well. To be honest, we should have been like Daft Punk right now. But that's a different kettle of fish.”

The Daft Punk comparison is a telling one. (And not just because LFO toured with the Parisian duo in the mid 90s.) Like Daft Punk, LFO came from the underground, putting their own spin on a US dance style - house for Daft Punk and techno for LFO; both acts’ debut albums ably straddled the under and overground musical scenes; both played live, at a time when it was far from fashionable to do so; and both had an incredible way with melodies and hooks, from Around The World to LFO.

Daft Punk, however, had excellent advice, from Thomas Bangalter’s father, on how to deal with the music industry, signing a deal with Virgin that gave the band almost unparalleled freedom to do what they wanted. Which is nothing against Warp Records, one of the most iconic British labels of all time. But a deal with Warp, then in its early days, was unlikely to give LFO the same control and scope that Virgin gave Daft Punk.

“We were all pretty young, even the guys from Warp were pretty young: they were like mid 20s,” Varley explains. “So we're all pretty… like newbies. It was like learning to swim and you’re just thrown in at the deep end. It was a bit of a shock.”

Varley considers his time in LFO as a learning experience. “I think when I look back now I would have invested more in doing the studio,” he says. “Because the thing was with me and Mark, we thought we'd be out of a job in half a year or a year. I went into it, trying to do it full time; Mark was still doing a job at a graphic design place but they laid him off or he got sacked. I don't know which. 

“But anyway then he went into doing music full time because I was saying, ‘Well, look, we’ve got one record out, it’s gone to number 12, if we can't make a living now, you never will.’ We were getting loads of gigs, pretty good money, three or four grand each, back in 1990.” 

And this, ultimately, is what he learned from LFO: that you can make a living from making music, something Varley continues to do today, selling G-Man music on Bandcamp and playing the occasional gig. It sounds pretty idyllic: the freedom to make the music you want with none of the pressures of the music industry behind you, punctuated by the odd moment of hero worship from devoted fans. 

And Varley is still doing it, still producing granite-tough techno grooves designed for the dance, following his own sacred muse. If I was him, I would perhaps regret turning down Top of the Pops; but other than that Varley seems to have an almost perfect life of musical freedom.

And this really resonates with me. Like most children, I once dreamed of being a pop star, with the undying love of the public at my every turn; when I got older I started to envy the life of the big-name DJ - not a pop star, necessarily, but certainly an object of worship. Now, in my 40s, I have realised I would hate all that; I would hate the attention, hate the crowds, hate the lack of privacy and the constant demands for photos and small talk. What I value instead is the ability to do what I want, to follow my own creative impulses wherever they may take me, independent of external pressures and demands. Which is pretty close to what Gez Varley has achieved, more than two decades after he released his first record.

There was a time, perhaps, when I felt slightly sorry for Gez Varley, who departed LFO to make obscure techno records, while Mark Bell swanned around with Björk and Depeche Mode. And there is no denying that Varley has had his fair share of difficulty, with music business affairs and health. But, as I get older, I wonder if Gez Varley might have actually stumbled upon the secret to a happy creative life.

Towards the end of our chat, Varley tells me a story about playing the Lindisfarne festival in Northern England in summer 2023, alongside the likes of Primal Scream, Pendulum and Altern-8. “We were in this tent, about 1,000 people, and I dropped LFO at the end of the set because you’ve sort of got to. The crown went mental and I was just stood there listening to it and I thought, ‘It still sounds fresh, 33 years on.’”

He runs though the names a few of the DJs who have been playing LFO recently, including Mike Skinner and Swedish techno don Adam Beyer. “It’s still great to hear it,” he concludes. “It’s still getting played out, getting respect. It’s one of them tracks: even when i die, it’ll be played at my funeral, won’t it? I’m not going to get away from it!”

*NB Matt Anniss, author of the excellent book Join The Future: Bleep Techno and the Birth of British Bass Music, has a different take on the Bananarama remix story. “Gez is wrong about Sweet Exorcist remixing Bananarama - the promo does indeed have SE mixes on, but Parrot claims they never did those and it was a sleight of hand by Amrik Rai, the Sheffield-based NME writer who had some connection with FON. Parrot is generally good with these things and him saying they didn’t do it is probably true - it’s not a very SE move. Who knows though!”

Some listening

Conducta - Where U Been?

You should, of course, no more judge a record by its cover than a book. But the cover of Conducta’s new single, which features a middle-aged couple having a romantic kiss in the middle of a rave, does do a good job in summing up the slightly nostalgic, very loving atmosphere of Where U Been?, a song that sees Conducta continue his journey into new sounds by revisiting the pop-ish drum & bass of Kosheen, full of hooks and rumble.

Aphex Twin - Rhubarb Orc. 19.53 Rev

The key is in the “rev”. Rhubarb Orc. 19.53 Rev is a reversed version of a song recorded at the rehearsals for Richard James’ Remote Orchestra shows at the start of the 2010s. But so exquisite, delicate and moving is the result that the fact that the audio is reversed is barely noticeable, which really does speak to some sonic witchcraft. (You can hear it unreversed here.) Rhubarb Orc. 19.53 Rev is being released as one of the extras in the new and extremely juicy Selected Ambient Works 2 reissue, where it fits right in alongside one of the landmark electronic music albums of the past few decades. So, er, pretty good, right?

Nivaldo Ornelas - O Que Há De Mais Sagrado

O Que Há De Mais Sagrado (or “what is most sacred”) is by no means a new track being originally released in 1978 on the debut album by Brazilian saxophone player Nivaldo Ornelas. But I have included it here because it is the stand out of stand outs among a new compilation that is itself a stand out: Everything Above The Sky / Astral Travelling by Luke Una, who has long been one of my favourite DJs. (And I do mean long: I first saw him DJ in 1995 ish, in Manchester.) Eschewing genre in favour of mood, Luke has put together a record of songs with transcendental properties, “making astral travel a possibility from wherever you may be situated”. I’m not sure I would go quite that far but it is an exquisite collection of music, with everything from spiritual jazz to a Conga Mix of a Manchester house classic, perfectly chilled but sharply interesting.

Kery James - Je Revendique

This isn’t new either: it’s a 2005 song by French rapper Kery James, once of Idéal J. But I’ve been watching the excellent DJ Mehdi documentary on Arte this week, this song emerged and it made me smaile at its sheer audacity. James and Mehdi went way back, to the early 90s when Mehdi produced for Idéal J. In 2005, when Mehdi was in full Ed Banger / Signatune madness and had pretty much left hip hop production, Kery asked Mehdi to produce a track for him in a “late 90s Public Enemy” style. Mehdi did this with typical élan, incorporating a synth screech that took the song squealing into the mid 2000s like an Ed Banger Bomb Squad. There’s an incredible scene in the documentary, too when Mehdi joins James for a live performance of Je Revendique, grinning from ear-to-ear as he scratches up the sample.

Florentino, DJ Ramon Sucesso - Pressure Funk (feat Shygirl)

I missed DJ Ramon Succeso at Primavera Sound, to my infinite regret, but this savage remix of Florentino’s Pressure Funk more than makes up for it. The remix is an example of Succeso’s Beat Bolha or bubble beat, which translates here into the kind of drum programming that sounds wrong but all the more right for being so - and polyrhythmic as hell. An anthem of weirdness.

Baiuca - Navajitas (feat. Xurxo Fernandes & Felisa Segade)

Stadium 2-Step, à la Overmono, but make it Galician? Baiuca is on it - and he’s added some razor sharpening samples. The result is a fascinating combination and, while I know very little about Galician music, I do know 2-Step and these beats are bumping.

Marina Herlop - Collige Virgo Gladium

It’s a (slightly belated) happy birthday to the Lapsus crew, a Barcelona organisation that includes a brilliant label, promotion team and a booking agency. To celebrate, they’ve put together VINT (“20” in Catalan), a compilation featuring many of the artists Lapsus have worked with closely over the past two decades. And is it a quality line up, incorporating excellent local acts (notably Marina Herlop and CLARAGUILAR) and renowned international names, from Suzanne Ciani to Kode9. Lapsus is one of those very modern labels that - to my mind - operates more on mood than in search of a particular sound, but VINT suggests that melody and experimentation sits behind all that the label does. Herlop’s Collige Virgo Gladium - rippling piano, pensive chords and touches of angelic vocal - is the perfect example of this mix.

Things I’ve done

Line Noise - With Junior Sanchez

As promised last week, the latest guest on Line Noise is New York city mainstay Junior Sanchez, a man who has done it all in dance music since he started DJing at the tender age of 11. He’s remixed Madonna, formed house supergroup Da Mongoloids with Daft Punk; and even worked with Katy Perry. His new record Art-O-Fact (Detroit Remix) arrives on Carl Craig’s Planet E label on October 11 and we talked about that; about Detroit and Miami; about Da Mongoloids’ album plans; his love of The Prodigy and even Tatu

The playlists

There are two: The newest and the bestest, with all the best new music of the last three years; and the Newest and the Bestest 2024, which is a variation on the above that you can probably work out. You get all the songs here. And you even get some more.